Carl Bielefeldt, professor emeritus of religious studies at Stanford, studied Zen under Shunryu Suzuki and Kosho Uchiyama, and received his PhD in Buddhist studies from Berkeley in 1980. He is the author of Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation and other works on early Japanese Zen, and serves as an editor of the Soto Zen Text Project, which provides annotated English translations of the scriptures of Japanese Soto Zen.